ACT II: Scene 14
Why Can’t the English [Australians]?
CIRCLE G RANCH, MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, INLAND CALIFORNIA
Wherein our heroine mopeth. Because she hath been stupideth.
Two days of packing up and traveling to the mountainous inland part of California later, I pulled up at the ranch.
“Mom? Dad?” I pressed open the front door of the farmhouse, and with a loud clunk dropped my duffel bag on the tile floor of the foyer. Christmas lights and garlands and spicy-sweet smells filled every corner of the room. “Are you here?”
A clattering came from the kitchen, followed by my mother’s soprano gasp.
“Eliza?” Mom came dashing to the front room where she embraced me. I hugged back, hard. It’d been far too long. “You’re here. I had no idea you were coming home for Christmas. I mean, I’d hoped, but we assumed you were at the mercy of your job and they’d never let you off when they could use your services on a holiday.” She hugged me tighter. “Your dad will be so happy. He’ll even saddle up Black Jack for you, if you want. The horse has missed you, too.”
My horse. I could hardly wait to see him. It’d been far too long. Mom was right.
“Do you need help with things? It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m still all right with baking.”
“Let me call your father.” Mom stepped out onto the wraparound porch and pulled the rope to ring the old iron bell. “Jim! Your girl is home. Jim!”
Dad’s head popped out of the barn a few seconds later and he came jogging across the gravel drive to meet me.
The rest of the welcome was just as warm, from the hugs of the smattering of ranch hands still around despite the holiday, to cheers of joy from a parade of neighbors who dropped in with plates of baked goods. Welcome home took the better part of the afternoon.
But when the hoopla settled, I still had some explaining to do, and Mom led me to the family room to wring it out of me.
“So she fired you. For…what?” Mom sipped her hot wassail, her legs curled up beneath her on the couch. I did the same trick with my own legs over on the recliner. There was a crackling fire in the grate, and the room smelled like everything good and home. “I thought you were the only person who cared about her child. Why give that up?”
I didn’t exactly want to admit that Mo-No had fired me for trying to make her a better person by means of a prank and then kissing the man Mo-No had intended to ensnare next into yet another loveless marriage, but I came up with a plausible explanation.
“I guess mostly she let me go because she gave her daughter to her soon-to-be ex-husband. She was done being a mother.” Probably for the best. “Rich people do weird things, Mom. Things we can’t understand.”
“You can say that again. I can’t imagine ever losing you.”
Those words poured through me like warm, spiced honey. My mother cared for me like I cared for Sylvie. Or more, maybe. The thought of that magnitude of love being directed at me ensconced me, warm like a homemade crocheted afghan of the softest yarn.
She wanted the best life for me like I wanted for Sylvie. And dad probably did, too. The thought of a world of heartache in my future made my mother and dad ache, like I did for Sylvie’s.
No wonder they were so concerned about my life choices. They wanted…my happiness. And with their distance and vision and love, they could see that working toward that Ph.D. hadn’t been the sure path to a life of fulfillment.
They were right. And it made my eyes sting a little and my nose need to sniff.
I got up and refilled my mug with the apple cinnamon orange drink, feeling more at ease and comforted than I’d felt in six months on San Nouveau combined. It was good to be home. Henry was right—again. Home for Christmas is good.
Dad walked in, his boots clunking on the pine floors.
“Dad? Do you know someone called Dr. David Smith?”
“Sure. He’s our ranch geneticist. You’ve met him once or twice. Stark white hair, even though he’s only in his forties.”
I bobbled my mug of hot cider and about fell back onto the rocking chair. I knew that guy; I’d met him quite a few times back in the day. One description would have had me realizing who he was in a second. All this past couple of weeks, I could have just called my dad. Dad would have known exactly what to do for Henry—and for me.
Questions. I needed to ask more questions—and listen when answers came. Not brush them aside like they were babblings of a delusional person.
Lesson learned. Point taken. New woman—here I came.
“Dr. David Smith is pretty much the world’s living expert on cattle breeding, but he chooses to live out here.” Dad eyed me. “That seems like a random leap of conversation topics. What’s going on?”
Holy cats.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just met someone who knew him.” Or should I say, I’d just kissed an Australian cattle baron who I’d assumed was a hobo and coerced him into play-acting to fool the residents of a privately owned secret island of insanely rich people as he duped my boss into falling in love with him so she’d supposedly become a nice person, but it didn’t work?
Yeah, I couldn’t add that part.
“He’s a good guy. You’re not interested in suddenly changing careers, are you?”
“Oh, honey.” Mom’s voice was laced with worry. “You’re not thinking about another career change, are you? Because your undergraduate degree and master’s didn’t have many of the prerequisite classes for genetics. You’d have to start all over.”
“No, Mom. I promise. Don’t worry, please.” Then again, I should offer them full disclosure. “I’m making some big changes, yes. I’m not thinking of genetics.”
“Whew.” Mom’s relief came out like a shot.
“But after the week, month, and year I’ve had, I’m pretty sure linguistics isn’t for me.”
I closed my eyes and sipped my drink for a second, thinking back on the email I’d read this morning from my dissertation approval committee, and the snarky, accusatory response I’d sent, telling them they were shallow, heartless jerks for not approving my first three research proposals—involving language acquisition for hearing impaired children who get cochlear implants (that was a no), or speech development methods for children with cleft palates (they hated that too), or even the proposal to record and save the dying spoken language of a native American tribe in the Sierras.
Yeah, they’d hated all those.
So I told them they could take their ‘sexy’ topic of how a perv or a predatory guy could fake an Aussie accent to more easily dupe a lonely woman into doing what he wanted, and put it where the sun didn’t shine.
I shouldn’t have hit send on that email, but I had, and now it was too late. Merry Christmas from Eliza Galatea.
“I’m a little slow figuring out that I’d been barking up the wrong career tree. Sorry.”
Mom frown-smiled, like she pitied me but understood and loved me anyway. I waited to get the life-choice lecture, that I now recognized was rooted in love, but instead she just asked me a gentle question.
“Did you have something else in mind?”
“Not yet.”
I did, but nothing I could tell them.
“You’ll consider this cheesy, Eliza,” Mom said, “but I’m going to quote a movie musical and tell you to ‘climb every mountain’ and find a dream that will need all the love you can give.”
I knew the Sound of Music reference all too well, and told myself I really ought to stay away from 1960s blockbuster movie musicals from here on out. However, that advice did sound solid. My mom did possess wisdom much like the Reverend Mother of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.
“I’ll just miss Sylvie, you know?”
I’d contacted her dad yesterday, talked with Sylvie a little on video chat, as much as it was possible to communicate with a toddler over the phone; she’d practiced saying Merry Christmas. It sounded a lot more like mm—cahs. I nearly choked up when MacDowell Bainbridge told me he and Sylvie and the other nanny would be going overseas for a few months, so I shouldn’t expect to contact her anymore for a while. I’d stemmed my tears while I was still on the phone with him, but it was hard.
“You’ll find someone or somewhere else to spend your love,” he’d said, dismissing me from Sylvie’s life, and now, hearing my mother say almost the same thing verbatim, it sank into my bones.
I knew the someone on whom I wanted to spend that love.
The times on the cliffs watching the breakers with Henry came flashing back into my mind: our mind-blowing first kiss, the one that had brewed between us for the full week of his stay, and then later our tender, passionate goodbye.
Now, with the passing days, I missed him like an amputee missed a limb. It seemed like I’d watched the helicopter lift him into the sky a million years and a million miles ago. If he was anywhere, he was home with that fatted calf and Jonno and his brother Frank, the names he’d mentioned, for Christmas. Home at Cherrington Downs Station.
Not the bus station.
A realization thundered over me, the sonic force of which broke my heart into pieces, because the career I wanted more than anything else in the whole history of my wanting a career was the one my mother had—rancher’s wife.
And I’d pretty much watched that possibility fly away in a helicopter to the other side of the planet. Henry was gone forever.